Consolidation is the Key

Information is the lifeblood of any organization. In current times,

information, and its usage has become a business critical factor and has a

direct impact on the survival of a business. Applications like CRM, business

intelligence, and data mining, ERP, web servers, email, knowledge management

etc. are being widely and effectively used across organizations worldwide. All

these business enablers generate and depend on information. This has caused an

exponential growth in the volume of information to be stored and managed. Older

architectures for storing information are no longer enough to maintain such

volumes of information across disparate applications and geographical locations.

But if you foresee a significant growth in storage requirement, you should

develop your storage consolidation strategy now.

Storage consolidation makes good business sense. It will facilitate drastic

reduction in storage costs (if planned and configured well), and improves the

overall quality of storage. Storage consolidation is the pooling and allocation

of shared storage resources among numerous application servers. Instead of

directly attaching devices to workstations and servers, the network provides

access to storage which is on a need/access rights, and timely basis. Storage

consolidation architectures are designed to address limitations associated with

DAS.

In an environment clustered with servers, it makes sense to consolidate

storage and thanks to a high-speed fiber channel infrastructure between storage

pools, disaster recovery can be reduced from hours to a few minutes. Many

organizations throughout the world have embarked on storage consolidation

initiatives. Worldwide market trends indicate an awareness and a migration by

many organizations towards consolidated storage. However in India storage

consolidation and management is yet to pick up. Most companies are satisfied

with the traditional tape backup and offsite backup, which in any case is a

basic prerequisite of a disaster recovery plan. Most organizations still operate

in storage silos and as storage requirements and applications increase, it

becomes extremely costly to organizations to maintain, backup and repair

hundreds of distributed storage devices. The demand for more and more storage is

on the rise, as information hungry organizations need richer and additional data

for conducting business.

Storage management must address some fundamental needs. For instance aspects

like high availability, accessibility, scalability, and manageability has to be

addressed in totality. Storage management is no longer the need of large

organizations alone, it is equally important for mid size and smaller

organizations who have moderate storage requirements. Storage solutions that are

available now are flexible enough to be scaled up and protect business

investment over a couple of years.

A recent market study indicates that the direct cost per megabyte of server

attached storage is less than the direct cost per megabyte of consolidated

storage, which is probably deterring many corporates from embarking on the

storage consolidation exercise in the cost sensitive Indian market. However, the

study indicated that the advantage is on indirect cost savings like supporting

fewer storage devices, less facility space, improved data access and

distribution, reduced risk of data loss, enhanced security, saving on time,

hands-off policy based access etc.

From a business perspective, consolidated storage will provide critical

business value such as, improved top-line revenue, return on IT investment, and

overall reduction in direct and indirect costs.

The author is GM (IT) at Redington (India).



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